1. Field
The present disclosure relates to a content management apparatus used in a digital signage system or the like, which controls content, manages a content display schedule, and controls delivery of content to a display device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, so-called digital signage has been widely spread in places such as station yards and shopping malls where there are a lot of people. Display devices are located in such places to display content such as advertisements.
Business formats in digital signage are as follows: generally, railway companies and location owners (administrators) such as shopping mall administrators install a digital signage system, and sell advertisement spots (time frames in a predetermined time slot) to advertisers, who are the users of the digital signage. Advertisement content or the like is displayed in the advertisement spots.
Delivery of content involves making of an advertisement sequence schedule and a delivery schedule. Some methods have been proposed to make these schedules in advertisement systems of the related art. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-236444 describes a method of preparing attributes that are common among advertisements, adding the quantified attributes to the individual advertisements, and accumulating them in an advertising database (DB) 105. Advertisements whose delivery time slots are not specified in advance are weighted according to each attribute to determine the frequency and sequence of delivery reflecting delivery conditions from the viewpoints of the delivery side and the viewer side, thereby creating an advertisement sequence schedule. Scheduling is performed on advertisements whose delivery time slots and frequency of delivery are specified in advance, thereby creating a delivery time schedule. The above two schedules are combined as a delivery schedule, and, on the basis of the delivery schedule, the advertisements are delivered from the delivery side to the viewer side while paying attention to the time, and the advertisements are displayed on a display on the viewer side.
In a digital signage system, a digital signage system administrator (hereinafter referred to as an administrator) needs to register to-be-displayed content on each display device. Specifically, a schedule for displaying items of content is specified by the administrator, and a set of items of content and a schedule for displaying the items of content is delivered to each display device, which enables the display device to display the items of content in accordance with the schedule.
Therefore, creating a content display schedule as above involves many tasks to be done by the administrator.
In the case of advertisement content in particular, it is of importance that, after a commercial for beer of company A, a commercial of the same attribute, such as beer of company B, be not be displayed consecutively. In the related art, the administrator needs to check these commercials to carefully configure the schedule, and this involves very complicated tasks. The administrator additionally needs to receive content from a plurality of advertisers, and to be aware of the needs of broadcasting frames to determine the schedule, which places a great burden on the administrator.
To increase the operation rate of digital signage serving as business, sales activities may be conducted to eliminate unsold advertisement spots or to reduce the number thereof. However, there is no system for efficiently proposing and selling advertisement spots until the very last minute of the content display schedule, which may let a business chance go by.
In contrast, when an advertisement spot is sold immediately before the content display schedule, the schedule is adjusted and the submitted content is received at the very last minute, which may place a yet heavier burden on the administrator.
Such operational complexity and the heavy burden may cause the administrator's human error, resulting in so-called broadcasting accidents in the digital signage, such as that nothing is displayed, wrong content is displayed, or content is not reproduced to the end and different content is started to be reproduced.